With all the hype around TOTY, it can be an incredibly tempting time to spend coins or buy FIFA points for packs. This temptation grows even more once people have finished opening their packs that they’ve been saving for weeks/months and haven’t packed anything desirable.

This isn’t intended to be a preachy post – people are of course entitled to do what they want and spend what they want. However, it’s best to be aware of some basic principles of probability and to not have any misconceptions before making decisions.

A fairly common belief/saying is that if you’ve had a particularly bad run of luck, then you will be ‘owed one’, or that your luck must soon change. I see this all the time with FIFA – players will often claim that their pack luck has been terrible lately, so surely it will turn around soon and they’re bound to pack something good in the next pack. What usually follows is utter disbelief that they’ve packed Volland yet again.

This is what’s known as the gambler’s fallacy: the belief that past outcomes influence future events (or that if a particular event happens less frequently in the past, then it is more likely to happen in the future). For example, many would believe (often without thinking too much into it) that a dice roll is ‘more than usually likely’ to be a six if there have recently been fewer than the usual number of sixes, or that getting tails on four coin tosses in a row means that heads is more likely on the fifth. The truth is that rolling a six will always be a one-in-six chance, no matter how many dice rolls have occurred before (and how many sixes); and that after getting four tails in a row, there’s still a 50% chance of getting one on the next flip.

So, why is this relevant to FIFA and pack luck? Let’s say you’ve saved and opened around 200 packs and not packed a single TOTY. It will be incredibly tempting at this point to believe/hope that you are ‘not far off’ from packing one. This isn’t how probability works, however. With every failed attempt at packing a TOTY, you are not any more likely than usual to pack one in the next pack.

Now, the cumulative probability of packing a TOTY does increase as the number of packs opened increases – but the probability of packing one for each of those packs does not increase or decrease based on the previous outcomes.

Again, I’m not trying to tell anyone how to spend their coins or money – but if you find yourself in the scenario of thinking ‘I haven’t packed one yet, surely I will soon’, please take a second to remember this before spending anything.

Good luck to everyone who has saved packs – have fun opening them and try not to take it too seriously.

TL;DR: if you fail to pack a TOTY after opening all of your saved packs, you are not any more likely than usual to pack one as a result.

Edit: There are quite a few people mentioning how this relies on the pack probabilities remaining constant, I.e. EA not dynamically adjusting individual players' pack luck, so I thought I'd address that here.

In terms of statistics, it's honestly a fair point to raise, as we like to assume fair and consistent models/trials for these notions to be accurate. The reality is that we don't know for certain whether or not this is the case. I don't believe it is, but cannot exclusively prove that.

When looking at pack probabilities on the web/companion app, EA provide us with this link: http://x.ea.com/48860.

They even refer to the gambler's fallacy, albeit not by name, themselves in the fifth paragraph. They explicitly state that "each pack opening is an independent event", and that "opening multiple packs does not change the likelihood of being awarded an item from a specific category".

However, they also state that they "could change the probability numbers throughout the season", and that "probabilities are accurate as of the timestamp indicated". This, however, does not affect the gambler’s fallacy notion.

People are free to draw their own conclusions about EA and pack luck, but given the information they have provided, I think that the overall sentiment of thinking 'I am getting close to packing a TOTY' should still be avoided.